PCLM-D-22-00203

Why don't Americans trust university researchers and why it matters for climate change

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Debnath,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

The two reviewers have each provided a number of useful comments which you are encouraged to address.

As a condition for publication, you must address each of the following comments by Reviewer 1:

Provide a clear definition, referring to literature, of the concept of “trust”.

Be careful not to convey too much confidence about there being a causal relationship here, as your empirical analysis has not proven one--even if it is suggestive of one.

Provide the wording of each key measure, and the information currently in Table SI 1 (Distributions of Dependent Measures), in the manuscript rather than referring to the SI.

Better justify the decision the reviewer mentions around lines 130-132 and 201-203. Why did you recode the four categories of the climate change importance question into two categories? Is this not an unnecessary loss of information? Why not keep all four categories, and fit an ordinal logistic model? Or even just linear models?

Also, consider elaborating a bit about the Generalizing Persuasion Framework, and explaining how it could be used (lines 392-399).

Reviewer 2 provides some very thought-provoking feedback, some of which clearly challenges your general approach. However, R2 does not question the usefulness of the data you present, or the competence of the statistical analysis. As such, you should make an effort to revise the article so as to address this reviewer's comments. Most generally, can you more fruitfully engage current literature and debates about the sources of and solutions to partisan and ideological divisions on science issues? (The reviewer has pointed to a number of sources you might consult and use.) More specifically, as a condition of publication, you must address the reviewer's objection about your normative position that trust in science is always a good thing. Maybe you could qualify this position, or, alternatively, defend it more strongly? Also, address the reviewer's comments about Democrats being the outlier here, not Republicans (in light of the latter's similarity to Independents). If you accept the reviewer's point, amend the text accordingly. If you do not, please explain why.

Furthermore, two separate comments which did not come from the reviewers:

You say you have a "nationally representative survey of American registered voters", yet the data collection was entirely online, with participants who (presumably?) opted in to answer surveys for YouGov in return for some kind of reward. Have you not, then, excluded voters who are not online, and voters uninterested in helping out YouGov? Internet penetration in American is no doubt high, but it's also certainly not 100%, and that means your sample cannot be fully representative. Likewise, YouGov's panels consist entirely of people who are more amenable to answering surveys; such people cannot be completely like the general population of voters. Assuming you agree, you should make these limitations clearer, and early on.

The percentage of people answering that climate change is a "natural event" (41) is in one sense extremely high, and even shocking; but in another sense it is not so high. As any climate scientist will tell you, the climate is always changing due to natural forces. However, it's currently changing overwhelmingly due to human activity. As such, it's regrettable that your survey forced people to choose entirely one or the other, rather than following a model like for example the 2016 European Social Survey, which asked respondents whether climate change is due entirely to natural processes, mainly natural processes, natural processes and human activities equally, mainly human activity, and entirely human activity. You need to point this out in your paper, in discussing the 41% figure. (Otherwise it would appear that in recent years Americans have grown more doubtful that climate change is anthropogenic, based on a contrast between your results and those for example from Pew in 2016: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2016/10/04/public-views-on-climate-change-and-climate-scientists/.)

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 08 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Malcolm Fairbrother, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Review of Why don’t Americans trust university researchers and why it

matters for climate change

Summary

The work are examining the relationship between trust in universities and opinions about climate change using a population-representative sample (n = 2096) from USA. Two models show that trust is negatively related to both the belief that climate change is a problem and anthropogenic climate change. A third model aims to predict trust in university research centers.

Review

In general, I found the introduction clearly written and well organized. I would, however, recommend the authors to put more work into defining and introducing “trust”.

L53-55. This is indeed an important implication. I would however recommend the authors to tone down or discuss the causal limitations of this implication. Because it does not follow from correlational data that (re-)establishing trust would actually lead to a decrease in climate change denial.

L126-153. I appreciated that the authors provide descriptive statistics in the SI. I do however recommend more clearly reporting the measure used in the paper. At this point, this section was not sufficiently clear. For example, please clearly state the wording of each (or at least the central) measures in the manuscript rather than referring to the SI.

L130-132; L201-203. If I understand correctly, the authors did dichotomic splits on data collected on a continuous scale. Please specify this decision and consider discussing the statistical implications in the discussion section.

Figures 1, 2, and 3 seem like clear visualizations of the results. Good job! Please consider specifying what is meant by “attend” and “environmental/political info”

L346-353. I appreciate that the authors specify the novelty of their work. Although the authors provide clear and important strengths, claiming that this work is “novel” because it uses 1) a “population-representative sample” and 2) “quite recent” data seem more like strength and less like novelties to me. The statistical model, might be novel, in that case, I recommend that the authors more clearly describe why it is.

L390-392. I believe this is a good point and an adequate recommendation for future research. If possible, please elaborate on what the authors mean by, and maybe provide some examples of framing effects.

L392-399. This is a good point. Please consider explaining/suggesting how the Generalizing Persuasion Framework could be used.

Reviewer #2: This paper presents analyses of public opinion data regarding climate change and trust in scientists. The authors do not pose formal research questions or hypotheses, but, implicitly, their literature review suggests that, consistent with some previous literature, they expect trust in university scientists to be a positive predictor of belief in the importance of climate change as an issue and belief that climate change is human-caused. The authors also expect that variance in these outcomes will be influenced by partisanship and political ideology, on the grounds that A) previous literature has shown lower levels of both trust in science and climate change beliefs among members of the political right, and B) elites in right-leaning politics have promoted rhetoric and action intended to undermine public trust in science and to sow skepticism about climate science in particular.

Generally, the authors’ expectations are sensible, given prior literature, and it is useful to have new public opinion data about these well-known patterns (i.e., the authors’ dataset is from May 2022, so it is quite recent). Other than the recency of the data, however, there is little about this paper that I would view as novel for the research community. For example, because of the lack of theoretical positioning and the absence of motivated hypotheses, the paper does not clearly advance any theories of public opinion or science/risk communication, nor political communication, nor other areas of research. In light of this, its main strength must be found in its utility as an empirical sketch of public opinion at this moment in time, which hinges on a very thoughtful, finger-on-the-pulse interpretation of the atheoretical, descriptive relationships presented.

Unfortunately, I don’t find the discussion of the existing relationships to be very compelling, nor are they clearly connected to emergent understandings of the state of public opinion about science (especially partisan conflict over science). First, the literature review speaks often of the need for more research on public opinion of climate change, of trust in science, and of the framing or communication of issues in science and risk. These are indeed fruitful and valuable areas of research, but the authors’ engagement (and citation) of works in these areas seems a bit shallow, focusing primarily on broad conclusions, such as the mere idea that science skepticism exists and that trust in science is (allegedly) declining among some groups. But these descriptive points are only the tip of the iceberg for research on these topics. Scholars are actively debating the sources of and solutions to partisan and ideological division about a variety of science issues, including climate change, and are questioning some of the “accepted wisdom” about trust in science, urging scholars to approach the topics with far greater conceptual and operational nuance. For example, there is a lot of work on trust in science---and the complexity of conceptualizing it and measuring it -- coming from scholars like Michael Siegrist and John Besley. Similarly, research on political polarization surrounding science (including climate change) has recently been discussed at length by Rekker, in Public Understanding of Science.

The authors’ shallow engagement with some of the literature on public opinion of science and risk is part of the reason for what I see as undue assumptions which appear throughout the text. For example, in analyzing their results, the authors draw attention to what they see as evidence, consistent with previous literature, of Republicans’ skepticism of climate science and lower levels of trust in science. On page 6, line 229, the authors say: “Next, in this model we see statistically significant and relatively sizeable estimates for the political features: partisanship and ideology. Relative to Republicans, we see that Democrats are more likely to say that climate change is an important problem. And relative to conservatives, those who identify as moderates or liberals are more likely to say that climate change is an important problem in the U.S. These estimates are larger in magnitude that any of the demographic and informational features in the model.” This description is not exactly inaccurate, but it is a description that curiously fails to acknowledge that Republicans’ attitudes are actually not significantly different from Independents for this or the other outcomes the authors present. Republicans and Independents are over 2/3 of the US population…so, how would the authors explain the relationship between this finding (Republicans/Independents being aligned) and the literatures they have cited which have shown that Republicans’ trust in science tends to be low and that their climate skepticism tends to be high? To me, it looks like Democrats’ trust in science and belief in climate change is simply exceptionally high compared to the majority of the population. If the “anti-science” rhetoric of Republican elites is presumed to be the driving force of Republicans’ climate denial or low trust, then why would they share attitudes with Independents? Perhaps the implicit theory of public opinion at work here is not the best one, but it is hard to know what the theory of public opinion is (again, the literature review does not commit to any expectations or theoretical framework).

I don’t actually have a clear answer to the questions I suggest above about alternative interpretations of the results, but my point is that there are more nuanced discussions going on in the relevant literatures that would help the authors to draw more careful and nuanced conclusions about their data. As it stands, their paper reads like a presentation of recent public opinion data that is couched in a restating of oversimplified wisdom about public opinion issues surrounding science (the political right is denying science; trust in science is in crisis; we need to restore trust among skeptical groups). There is some merit to these arguments, as oversimplified as they might be, but they are not at all new and they are also being complicated, challenged, and revised in a large body of emerging work in science communication, science and technology studies, risk research, the sociology of religion, and elsewhere. For all these reasons, I feel that the value of this paper as a research paper is limited—it would be better suited to a topline report. Or, if the authors do wish to engage in multivariate analyses that are likely to be more useful with the introduction of controls, then there should be deeper engagement and conversation with existing work in order to connect the interpretation of the regression results to a more nuanced collection of competing arguments for the best “story” the data are telling.

Beyond this broad concern about the value of the work in its current positioning, I am concerned that the authors adopt a philosophically and democratically undesirable outlook on public opinion of science as something that needs to be forced in line. For example, the authors say the following:

“First, more research like ours needs to be done to understand specifically who currently trusts university research on climate change and sustainability, who does not, and who is persuadable. Each segment requires a different approach. Those who currently trust university climate and sustainability science need to have their trust reinforced; those who do not currently trust university climate and sustainability science will need a longer-term strategy aimed at changing their minds (which is a difficult thing to do). Science should be made accessible and interpretative. Perhaps most importantly, those who are persuadable, who can lean either towards more or less trust, need the most immediate attention: what information, framing and messages will push them to being strongly trusting of university research on climate and sustainability? Second, and relatedly, we need more research on the framing and messages needed to strengthen trust for the already trusting, and to persuade those with more malleable opinions.”

These strike me as disturbing prescriptions for action. What level of public trust in or skepticism of scientific institutions is desirable? Are scientists infallible? Would we want members of the public to follow scientists blindly? Who exactly should be doing the “persuading” of publics to accept science—scientists themselves, or policy-makers, someone else? Might attempts to coerce public opinion of science—by a group of people who are supposedly committed to free inquiry and skepticism as a part of their professional practice—possibly backfire? These are important questions at the heart of the study of science communication, the philosophy of science, of literatures on science governance and the history of science, but the authors engage with none of these questions.

Further, the idea that some populations might have legitimate reasons to be skeptical of scientists is not considered anywhere in this paper. If we were talking about politicians in the above quote, these sentences would seem obviously absurd, manipulative, or propagandist. Granted, the scientific community is arguably not a social institution that should be viewed in the same ways as politicians, and “trust” in scientists versus politicians may have dissimilar philosophical or governance implications. But, then, I think the authors would do well to grapple with this complexity, given that they are currently arguing that publics should be compelled, through public communication tactics, to trust the scientific community.

To be clear, I strongly believe the authors are well-intended. I think they have collected very useful data here and that they are clearly proficient in statistical analysis of public opinion data. I am simply concerned that they are lacking (for now) in sufficiently deep engagement with the complexity of the public opinion issues they are studying, which I think would be necessary to make their paper useful to the research community, and to avoid being misleading to other audiences outside of these domains.

One suggestion to the authors would be to better understand different groups’ sources of low trust, including possible ways that scientists may have violated their trust. For example, the authors fleetingly mention that members of the Black community have low belief in human-caused climate change, in their results. Why is that? The authors say little about this. There is a complex history between the Black community and scientific communities that might help them interpret their findings. Further, if some groups believe that scientists are only out to advance their careers, as the authors note, might it be useful to ask whether there is any legitimacy to that belief? Are scientists always driven by the best of intentions? Should the public be expected to assume that? A large body of STS literature by LaTour or Wynne would be informative here.

Overall, the authors do not seem to have engaged with the theoretical and empirical work which has long attempted to understand why different groups exhibit low trust or even science denial and whether some of their attitudes might in fact be legitimate, nor have the authors grappled with the ethics of persuasion in science communication contexts, nor the theories of public opinion and modern communication ecologies that might account for variance in their results. The unquestioned assumption seems to be that members of the public have been manipulated by political elites or disinformation actors into exhibiting low trust (e.g., the Republican political machine sowing doubt, which it has indeed tried to do), and that, therefore, those publics seem to be "infected" with a science denial problem. The prescription for action is thus to cure the citizenry of the low-trust disease that Republicans unleashed.

While there might be some merit to that view, it feels woefully incomplete and unreflexive to me, in its failure to acknowledge the possibility that there are also valid concerns about science/scientists among some populations, among other things. Again, the data are valuable, but I don’t think the authors have yet found a way to present their data in a compelling way that does justice to existing discourse and that offers useful prescriptions for future studies or action.

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PCLM-D-22-00203R1

Why don’t Americans trust university researchers and why it matters for climate change

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Debnath,

Thank you for re-submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. We continue to feel that it has merit, but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria. Therefore, we invite you to submit a another revised version of the manuscript, carefully addressing the points below.

The revised manuscript includes a great deal of new text that is confusing or otherwise unhelpful. In particular, the new discussion of the definition of trust is anything but clear. Please try again to provide a clear statement of how you are using trust, and relate that definition to relevant social scientific literature.

Here are a list of new pieces of text whose meaning is unclear, which contain errors, and/or make easily avoidable writing errors:

"Frameworks like these may be helpdul doe improving public trust in science by identifying PSR and ISR trigger points." (Typos.)

"This sample was raked to gender" (What does the word "raked" mean here?)

"By design, we limit the response to the question regarding the cause of climate change to “human activities” or “natural events” to align the overall framing of this study with the recent scientific consensus from the IPCC that while climate is always changing due to natural forces, human activities have accelerated this change. This framing also enables us to empirically test the relational trust" (What do you mean you "limit the response"? You exclude some respondents? And what "framing" are you referring to here?)

"Fage-Butler et al., [29] presents a comprehensive meta analysis" (This is not a meta-analysis, and, contrary to what you say about four narratives, they discuss six narratives.)

"Therefore, researchers have viewed trust in attitudes as a construct articulated or even defined by the survey questions." (What does this mean?)

"Cognitive trust reflect upon the" (Grammar.)

"Scholars frame the notion of affective trust as ‘emotional aspect of trust’ " (Grammar.)

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 08 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Malcolm Fairbrother, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

Journal Requirements:

1. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

2. We have noticed that you have uploaded Supporting Information files, but you have not included a list of legends. Please add a full list of legends for your Supporting Information files after the references list. 

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

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Why don’t Americans trust university researchers and why it matters for climate change

PCLM-D-22-00203R2

Dear Dr Debnath,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Why don’t Americans trust university researchers and why it matters for climate change' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow-up email from a member of our team. 

Please note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

IMPORTANT: The editorial review process is now complete. PLOS will only permit corrections to spelling, formatting or significant scientific errors from this point onwards. Requests for major changes, or any which affect the scientific understanding of your work, will cause delays to the publication date of your manuscript.

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Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Climate.

Best regards,

Malcolm Fairbrother, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate